Richard was born in Davenport, Iowa in 1944. In 1967, he received his B.A. from the University of Iowa and later received his M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Cincinnati in 1969.

"I increasingly feel that the deeper an artist burrows into himself, the greater become the odds of his saying something profound. I have no desire to be well-rounded artistically. The risks that I have taken and contemplate taking relate to this 'burrowing' process of getting ever deeper into my art. The resultant imagery has always been, in my mature work, metaphoric to the themes of impermanence and decay..."